The Everyone’s Environment conversations toolkit

The Everyone’s Environment conversations toolkit can help you discuss environmental topics with your users.

Why a conversation about environmental action?

Environmental issues may not be the highest priority for your organisation or the people you support. However, the people supported by your charity are likely to be disproportionately impacted by climate change and nature loss.

But, there is potential to improve every part of people’s lives – health, jobs, income, education, skills, transport, homes and more – through well designed environmental action.

Everyone should have the information and opportunities to be informed and involved. And everyone should be supported to have a voice on what environmental action looks like.

When should I use the toolkit?

It’s best to incorporate conversations into your existing mechanisms and service delivery. This is part of good practice for user involvement, and it also reduces the resource it requires.

Meet people where they are. Start with their priorities and immediate needs, and then explore where action (by individuals, charities, or governments) could help bring about social and environmental benefits. For example , like home insulation reducing bills and carbon emissions.

You can adopt or adapt the resources below. You could run the sessions in-house or collaborate with others.

Experience shows that the best conversations about the environmental crises are positively framed, build a sense of agency, and use straightforward language. Generally, try to connect to people as individuals, making conversations as real as possible. For example, consider where questions about future priorities might connect to the five senses – what does that feel like? What does it sound like?

How should I use the toolkit?

These resources are based on what NPC and our partners used to support our conversations with young people, older people, Disabled people and people from ethnic minority communities.

We used them to run group discussions of around 2 hours (both online and in-person). But you could use them however you want. For example, you could use these questions as a series of short conversations that happen as part of regular service delivery. Or, these questions could be developed into a survey.

These resources are intended as a template that you might find helpful in getting started – this isn’t the only, or the best, way of doing this! We hope that you can use this as inspiration for your own context and capacity. If you’d like 1:1 support to design or deliver consultation, get in touch with NPC to discuss.